In the first episode of Jean Cocteau’s Le sang d’un poète (The Blood of a Poet, 1930), entitled “The Wounded Hand or The Scars of a Poet”, an isolated artist creates art from his own wound.
Soon after the film starts, the Poet draws a face, but the mouth of his portrait begins to move.
Scared by the strange phenomenon, the Poet tries to wipe off the mouth, but the mouth - representing a wound through which poetry speaks - adheres to his hand, muttering and begging for air (“Taken out of a portrait where the naked hand had contracted it like leprosy, the drowned mouth seemed to fade in a small pool of white light,” read the intertitles).
Eventually, both the Poet and the mouth in his hand fall asleep and, the next morning, while trying to get rid of the mouth, the Poet presses his hand on the lips of a female statue, giving her life.
The statue reminds the Poet that one cannot get rid of wounds that easily and her words start a new series of nightmarish visions.
Proceeding through allegories dedicated to the memory of Pisanello, Paolo Uccello, Piero della Francesca and Andrea del Castagno, all painters of insignias and enigmas, the film is a surreally elaborate, magically disturbing and experimentally inspiring metaphorical portrait of the artist as a poet.
Cocteau turned indeed into images the words and thoughts of a poet’s mind, creating a fantastically bizarre work.
This is why this film hasn’t got any real plot, but follows a succession of visionary sequences, from bubbling mouths and limbless statues talking and bleeding, to mirrors transforming into pools of water and beautiful black angels with intricate metal wings.
The vision of the wounded hand with an embedded mouth in its palm has recently been haunting my imagination together with another image, that of the wooden hand integrated in one of Adrian’s designs showcased in the catwalk scene of Cukor’s The Women, a leitmotif that reappeared in different collections throughout the years (for images regarding Cukor's film and other "hand designs", please check out this post).
These last few days have been rather stressful for too many reasons, and, in between freezing temperatures and nursing a bad cold and flu, the vision of the wounded hand kept on coming back to my mind.
So, locking myself away from the madding crowds of Christmas shoppers, I looked around me, trying to find something to recycle and reuse and maybe fashion out of it a piece that reminded me of Cocteau and Adrian.
A wooden hand of the sort you find in art shops that my brother gave me a while back as a present and a black leather swatch that had been lying around my desk for a while, happened to be on my way.
I quickly assembled the two together and fashioned out of them a neckpiece that can be used as a scarf, but also as a flamboyant accessory. The thing I particularly like about this piece is that I can wear it in different ways, depending on how I fold the leather or bend the fingers of the hand, creating various combinations according to the outfit I'm wearing.
Looks like I will have to thank Jean Cocteau and Adrian for inspiring me this piece (and my brother who provided me with one of the key elements to make it...)!
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